Bertopic

I am not here to criticize or praise any particular era. I want to understand what songs mean, explore how they relate to one another through embeddings, and follow how the story they tell unfolds along its narrative arc. Seeing that evolution laid out makes me ask: which feelings endure from one decade to the next? Which values appear, change shape, or take on a different weight? Over the decades, the front line of what worries us has moved, and the move starts with how we perceive the city. Fear, as in the movies, first lived outside our doors, in the street, and ended up as a mantra repeating inside our heads. That shift is what I set out to follow along the narrative arc. This time I follow songs that talk about fear, from the eighties to 2026. I want to see which worries remain and what changes in the way they are told: who is afraid, what they fear, what they value, and how they respond. When I listen to albums, that mix of permanence and change is part of what draws me to following a band’s evolution. Here I try to turn that curiosity into a reading we can test and visualize. ...

Abstract This study traces the lyrical evolution of the Beatles across four albums — Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Abbey Road (1969) — using a pipeline of LLM-driven topic modeling (BERTopic), a vector database (OpenAI text-embedding-3-large indexed in ChromaDB), embedding geometry, and graph theory. The study puts a falsifiable question to the canonical critical narrative — that the Beatles moved through four discrete stylistic eras — by testing whether the albums occupy separable territories in lyrical-semantic space. ...